Lars Attacks!

When the gifted—and yes, famously bleak—director Lars von Trier scandalized the film world this year by cracking Nazi jokes at Cannes, he managed to (a) ruin the rapturous reception of his new apocalyptic movie starring Kirsten Dunst and (b) offend and mystify millions who caught that bizarro appearance. Chris Heath travels to Copenhagen to allow the auteur to explain himself. And, boy, does he explain himself

I thought I was a Jew for a long time and was very happy being a Jew.... I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi.... Which also gave me some pleasure.... What can I say? I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely.... I'm just saying I think I understand the man. He's not what you would call a good guy but I...yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit.... Okay, I'm a Nazi.

—Excerpts from Lars von Trier's answer to a question at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, May 18, 2011

···

No one could accuse the Danish film director Lars von Trier of having opted for an easy, safe, or uncontroversial path through life. His films are full of dark surprises; anytime you feel calm and smug that you get what he's doing, that's just when he turns everything around on you. Sometimes this takes the form of grand sensation (for some examples, turn the page), sometimes great longueurs, sometimes painful and almost surreal sentimentality. His methods have often been unconventional (he co-founded the back-to-basics Dogme 95 movement though swiftly abandoned many of its tenets) and have sometimes taken their toll both on those he has worked with (after appearing in his Dancer in the Dark, Bjrk declared she would never act again) and on himself. He's not in the business of trying to make people feel comfortable.

But to be crystal clear right from the start—and in spite of the headlines he made this year when he was thrown out of the Cannes Film Festival after being accurately quoted as declaring "I'm a Nazi"—he is not a Nazi. He is in no way sympathetic with Nazi philosophy, nor with their most infamous acts.

So why say it?

An ill-judged joke? A surreal moment of madness?

Probably both. But there's much more to it than that.

···

When I arrive at Zentropa, the film studios he co-owns in the suburbs of Copenhagen, the very first thing Trier—the "von" is an affectation he adopted before he became successful—tells me is how anxious he now is about speaking with the press. Trier has always tended to express himself in ways that could be presented as provocative and reckless, of course, but only now is he fearful of the consequences. "After Cannes," he says, "I got extremely paranoid, because suddenly I could see that this could actually stop my career completely. Which is of course something I don't want. Maybe also because I'm getting older—you get more afraid... It's like a tightrope walker who's afraid of falling. And that's not good if you're a tightrope walker." It's not entirely clear whom he distrusts the most—the person he is now speaking with, the world, or himself. "I know that I cannot be with a person for three hours," he says, "without saying at least ten things that would kill me." (This will turn out to be absolutely true. Fairly represented, what Trier says is often strange enough; if a sufficiently mean-spirited visitor chose to quote selectively from his strangest ruminations, they could skewer him completely.)

Anxiety itself is not new to Trier. "It's always been quite painful being me," he says. "If anyone cares. Which they shouldn't." It began young. He remembers when he was about 6 seeing a TV program about diseases and retreating under a desk in his mother's bedroom to await the sicknesses to come. That fear was soon joined by his terror of an atom bomb. "Each time I heard a plane, I ran and was hiding," he says. Before sleeping, he had to arrange his possessions in a certain way to personally avert a world apocalypse. His civil—servant parents, Ulf and Inger, were extremely liberal in their refusal to put constraints on him as a child, and he has often talked about how he doesn't necessarily consider this a gift. When he would ask, for instance, whether he would die in the night, his parents—instead of feeding him the lie that has consoled children for eternity—would rationally concede that, while unlikely, it was certainly possible.

When Trier was 12 and had stopped attending school, he was briefly taken to an institution. Much later, he was told what had been recorded in his medical notes at the time—that when he had arrived at the facility and was asked his name, he had replied: "Lars Hittegods."

Lars Lost Property.

Throughout his childhood, he clung to the belief that he simply had to hang on until he became an adult, because adults don't have fears like this. He was wrong. "It exploded even more," says Trier. "That was such a disappointment. An enormous disappointment." He now wonders whether the problem may be that he doesn't have as effective a filter in his brain as most people—a boon for his life as a filmmaker but leaving him prone to worries by the thousand.

Many years of therapy and medication followed. Then, in 2007, he sank into a new, more acute kind of depression. "I was just lying, crying, for a week, just looking into a wall, couldn't get up. I was so afraid." He thought he would never make another movie. "Fear is hell," he says. "It's really hell. The worst."

He recovered slowly and was still very fragile when he did eventually return to make Antichrist, a disconcerting tale of extreme grief and sexual psychosis. For his new film, Melancholia, with Kirsten Dunst, he has mined his troubles more directly—it focuses on the story of a depressed woman as a planet heads on a collision course with Earth. On the most simplistic level, it stands as the ultimate movie-length retort, for anyone who has ever been depressed, to the dismissive suggestion that whatever is troubling them is not the end of the world.

···

Von Trier Amok in Cannes: That was the headline in one Danish tabloid. But this was twenty years ago. His sin then: While accepting a trophy for his third feature film, Europa—not the top award, which he felt he deserved—Trier referred to that year's president of the Cannes jury, Roman Polanski, as "the midget." (Trier acknowledges that there was some pique behind what he said, though he points out that it was also a reference to how a character played by Polanski is alluded to in Chinatown.) Most of Trier's films since then have premiered at Cannes, and there has been usually a fuss of some kind, whether over his absence (1996: Breaking the Waves), a war with his lead actor (2000: Bjrk in Dancer in the Dark), or his perceived anti-Americanism (2003: Dogville). "I said Bush was an asshole, and I meant that," he remembers. But what happened this year was different. "I think some of my provocations have been just," he says. "Here, it was just nonsense. Silliness. It was not of any relevance to the film."

I ask him whether he has even watched the footage of the press conference.

"No," he says. "I think I have avoided it."

Will he ever watch it?

He seems to take this as some kind of challenge. "We can watch it right now," he suggests. He moves to call it up on YouTube, but I tell him not to bother—it's right here on my iPad. Trier takes a seat next to me on a sofa barely big enough for the two of us. "I'm ready for this!" he declares, kind of gung ho.

The bravado doesn't last long.

"Ayee-eeee..." he says, physically wincing, as it begins. (His ramblings are prompted by a question partly inquiring about the interest he had expressed to a Danish film magazine about the Nazi aesthetic and their achievements in the field of design.) "Yeah, okay. I remember that..." He asks me to stop it for a moment, then continues. "Terrible..." He sees the distressed look on Dunst's face, helpless to stop the flow of disastrous words from the mouth of someone inches away from her. "I kind of didn't look at her," he remembers. "But I had a feeling that she was kind of reacting. But then I thought 'Ah, these Americans, they're always so scared of everything, you know...' "

Just watching Dunst's face, as it shifts between amusement, concern, bafflement, horror, compassion, and pain, without ever losing its dignity, tells you as much about what is happening as Trier's words do. But mostly he can't even watch, leaning away and shielding his head with his hands as though blows are about to rain down on him. About two minutes in, he asks me to pause the video again and talks for a long while. Eventually I ask whether he wants to see the rest. "It's so painful for me," he says, "but if you insist, I can."

We listen on:

...What can I say? I understand Hitler...

"Oh fuck."

...he did some wrong things...

"That's an understatement..."

...I sympathize with him...

"Oh fuck..."

We don't make it to the end.

"This is why I shouldn't do interviews—I should just shut up and I should do my films. This was terrible to listen to."

"I'm not sorry... I'm sorry that I didn't make it clear that it was a joke. But I can't be sorry for what I said—it's against my nature."

Nonetheless, he says that at the time he had no idea what a big deal it was going to be. "I took for granted that they knew I was not a Nazi," he says. "There was no feeling that this was a complete disaster." A few hours later, a press guy told him that there was a problem. He was also told that he needed to apologize.

For someone who thinks in the way that Lars von Trier thinks, the idea of saying "sorry" was not a simple one. "I don't think there is a right or wrong thing to say. I think that anything can be said. That is very much me. The same with film—anything can be done in a film. If it can be thought in the human mind, then it could be said and it could be seen on a film. Of course you get troubles for it afterwards, that's for sure, but that doesn't make it wrong. To say I'm sorry for what I said is to say I'm sorry for what kind of a person I am, I'm sorry for my morals, and that would destroy me as a person. It's not true. I'm not sorry. I am not sorry for what I said. I'm sorry that it didn't come out more clearly. I'm not sorry that I made a joke, but I'm sorry that I didn't make it clear that it was a joke. But I can't be sorry for what I said—it's against my nature."

Have you never done anything in your life that you're genuinely sorry for?

"No."

Really?

"No."

That's astonishingly unusual.

"Maybe, but that's maybe where I'm really sick in my mind. You can't be sorry about something that's fundamentally you. Maybe I'm a freak in that sense." He ponders a moment, wondering whether he can think of any exceptions to this rule. Perhaps just one:

"I'm sorry when I was a child I had a little bird that I fed, and I was so young I forgot it when I was on holiday, and then it was dead when I came home. That I was sorry for. That was terrible. But then again, I forgot. And I feel somehow that I was criticized highly for this Cannes, and I must say that I feel like a child who has been falling over on his bike, and I've been yelled at for that. Yes, you will yell at the child for some time that he has not been driving carefully enough, but you can't continuously yell at him because he hurt himself."

In the past few days, Lars von Trier has found himself in the newspapers for a new reason. Dogville—the film he is most proud of—tells the story of a fugitive named Grace, played by Nicole Kidman, who hides in a small town. The movie deftly unwraps the ways in which the townsfolk's suspicion turns to hospitality, and then how that same hospitality slowly festers into abuse and contempt, and then into the horrifying exploitation and violation of the outsider. But few first-time viewers can expect the film's final minutes. When the townsfolk eventually betray Grace to her original pursuers, these turn out to be her father's gangland organization, which she has refused to join. She now accepts her father's offer to help run the organization and, in her first act of power, orders that every single one of the townsfolk—all her betrayers, men, women, and children—be shot dead.

The previous week, in Norway, Anders Breivik blew up a bomb in Oslo and shot dozens dead on a small island nearby. When journalists inspected his Facebook page, they found a list of his favorite movies. First was Gladiator. Second was 300. Third was Dogville.

"What immediately came to mind," says Trier, "was that what he did on the island was a replica of the scene in the film, which of course was terrible." He points out that the film was not intended to endorse the final bloodbath as justified, but to ask questions about what kind of reactions are acceptable when one has su­ered harm. "Of course," he says, "if somebody told me that seventy-six people would be killed because of my film, I wouldn't have made it."

Trier, a well-known public figure in Denmark, has spoken out before against the more extreme right-wing currents in Danish political life, and in the wake of what happened in Norway he deliberately stepped into the debate, highlighting the links between the Danish People's Party and Norwegian right-wingers and suggesting that they bore some culpability for fanning extremist feeling of the kind Breivik embraced. Trier seems somewhat amused by their incensed comeback. "They said, 'How can you take the words of someone who is mentally ill, perverted, and a Nazi?' "

Naturally it would be too easy—and very un-Trier—to simply brush off their slurs. When I ask him how many of these characteristics he recognizes as his own, he replies, "I have to say something very controversial—that I claim a tiny bit of all. Because I believe a potential of being a Nazi lies in all human beings. Mentally ill? Yes—I would never claim I was sane. A pervert? Yeah, well..." He blows out a gently whistling stream of air. "It depends how you define the word. I'm not so afraid of being called a pervert. I think they mean that I did perverted films. Which I'm sure you could claim."

Those searching for signs of perversion may well find further evidence in the movie Trier is now writing. A colleague recently urged him "not to fall into the trap that so many aging directors fall into—that the women get younger and younger and nuder and nuder." The wrong words to the wrong man. Trier retorted that, on the contrary, he most definitely intended for the women in his films to get both younger and nuder. To this end, he's planning a movie about "the development of one woman's erotic life from 1 to 50 years old" called The Nymphomaniac. (When our lunchtime sushi arrives, he moves some handwritten Danish scribblings off the table between us. "These are notes on sexuality of outrageous kinds," he mutters. "You don't want to know...") It will be shot in soft- and hard-core versions: "My problem, of course, as a cultural radical I cannot think of making a film about a woman's sexuality without seeing penetration in it."

It was as a result of Nazi oppression that Trier's parents even met. They were both evacuated to Stockholm during the Second World War—his mother because she was no longer safe due to her work in the Danish Resistance, and his father because of his Jewish heritage. Though his father was not a practicing Jew, and though Trier was always well aware that Jewish lineage is strictly speaking inherited only through the mother, this cultural legacy was an important one for Trier in his youth. "I always felt very Jewish," he says.

As well as his affinity for Judaism, Trier was also a member of the Young Communists, and though he became disenchanted with the philosphy's real-world failures, those ideals still appeal to him. Still, that is not to say that the fascination with Nazism Trier seemed to display at Cannes was a one-off outburst, bubbling out of nowhere. If someone had bothered to pull together his collected thoughts on the subject over the years in a deliberately piecemeal and sensationalistic fashion, things might have been much more awful for him. The earliest example I find is from twenty-seven years ago, after his early student films were accused of being pro-Nazi. "It's like people think that when Nazis have been involved in something, then you should really keep away from it out of fear that you will be connected with it if you don't," he noted. Then there's his 1990 response to the French newspaper Libération's attack on Europa's postwar tale as siding with the Nazis, in which he refuted the charge but then added, "We had a joke, though, that I would win the Iron Cross for the film!" Or there's the 1999 interview in which he shares his idea of doing a soap set in a concentration camp and on this scenario's unusual advantages when it came to casting: "If the actors caused any trouble, it would be very easy to get rid of them." There's also the 2008 interview he gave after his plans fell through to direct Wagner's The Ring in Germany: "'It was probably just as well. The problem with working in Germany is that I can't stop the Nazi jokes." There are plenty of others.

Most problematically of all, someone might have unearthed the thirty-seven-­minute movie The Orchid Gardener, which Trier made when he was 21 years old and in which he plays the lead. Even Trier shudders a little when I mention this and is relieved to hear that it doesn't appear to be available anywhere on the Internet. He shakes his head at the memory: "I am in a Nazi uniform, I am a transvestite, I am killing a pigeon, it's misogynist as hell—it's a caricature of a Strindbergian character running around raping children. Every scene in the film is politically so uncorrect." He remembers that when it was shown to a university audience there was only one question asked afterward: Why? "When I was younger," he says, "even more than today, I needed to show the dark sides very much."

If there is one thing these examples show, other than that Trier has always had a perilously dark and transgressive sense of humor, it is that he has always refused to accept that there should be any taboo in trying to understand every aspect of what is generally considered the most shameful moment in European history. The polite convention is to acknowledge Nazis as on the other side of the line that divides good from evil, human from inhuman, and to respectfully move on. But while there is not one sentence in all of the many careless words Trier has said that in any way implies an apology for, or denial of, the Nazis' terrible acts, he is clearly fascinated by how the engineers of these atrocities must also have been humans who, at times, may not have been so different from the rest of us.

Even in talking to me, he returns again and again to the subject, even as he chastises himself for doing so. ("You can't say I haven't given you ammunition," he observes after yet another elaboration.) One could see all this as a kind of self-­sabotage, but to me it feels more like a rigorous masochistic honesty; that to restrain his thoughts about the world as they appear in his mind would be an unbearable compromise. "I'm an idealist to some point, so if you have to try to be honest then you have to be completely honest," he explains, "and then you have to take every gun in the world and aim them at yourself."

···

When Trier was 33 years old, his mother, su­ering from cancer, was taken to the hospital where she would eventually die. His father had died ten years before. A couple of days before her death, Trier was alone at his mother's bedside, and that is when she chose to tell him something she had kept from him his whole life: Ulf Trier was not his father. His father was actually called Fritz Hartmann, a married man who had been her boss and with whom she had had a long affair. She told Lars that she had deliberately chosen to have a child with Hartmann because there were artistic genes in his family. She said that he was a wonderful, wonderful person and that Lars would like him. "I don't remember how she said it," he says, "but I remember my reply: 'If this was a scene from Dynasty, it was really a poor one.' "

But he also immediately knew that what his mother was telling him was true.

Why do you think she told you?

"Bad conscience?"

After his mother died, he went to clean out her house. There was her treasured glass bowl, and all her precious ornaments. "I smashed all the precious things that she always said, 'Oh, we have to be careful about this.' "

Later, he went to see his biological father. Trier found him rather less wonderful than advertised. Hartmann told him that he had believed Trier's mother had been using contraception, as though this absolved him of all responsibility, and uttered, to his son's face, the words: "I never accepted that child." He eventually told Trier that if there was more to be communicated, it could be through his lawyer. "It was not so nice," Trier reflects, "to meet the man and be completely rejected." (There was no doubt he was Trier's father. Even Trier could see the similarity, and later the man's more welcoming children offered Trier the blood test that confirmed it.)

Over time Trier realized how deeply this knowledge had affected him. "I was really shaken by it," he says. "A bit like Cannes—if you had asked me before I would have said it wouldn't have shaken me at all, but it shook me very much." After her death, he found letters by his mother—some to Hartmann and one to her husband's mother just after she married the man Trier considered his father, saying "I will treat him as kindly as I can." Trier emphasizes the last three words. "So she was a tough bitch." He now believes that "she screwed around quite a lot" but that the man he knew as his father did not. "Maybe I'm raising my father to be more of a saint than he really was, but I must say I love him very much," he says. "And I don't love my mother very much if you ask me right now."

All of this explains in large part why, when faced with an open microphone and a question about Germany's past at a Cannes press conference, Lars von Trier said what he said. Hartmann's family background was German. That's what Trier was talking about when he said, "I thought I was a Jew for a long time...but then I found out I was really a Nazi"—the thought that set his whole disastrous monologue in motion. Trier's biological father wasn't literally a Nazi—in fact, Hartmann also had a documented role in the Resistance—but what Trier said represented the shift he had been forced to address in who he was and where he had come from. That's also why his words were so muddled: It was a clumsy mishmash of world history and his personal history, of distant conflicts in midcentury Europe and more recent conflicts within his own psyche and genome, conflicts he is clearly still struggling to resolve.

···

"It was like watching your friend dig themselves in the biggest hole," says Dunst, recalling what it was like to sit next to Trier as it all unraveled. "And you know them, and you know their sense of humor, and you know how inappropriate this kind of forum is for something like that.... You know, I wanted to say 'Shut up,' but I was kind of paralyzed also in the moment. I didn't want to be dragged into this conversation at all either. And I was so afraid.... If he doesn't get a reaction the first time, I think there's something in him that will just keep pushing until he does. I know it's Lars, but I was scared for him."

Dunst was not actually supposed to be the star of Melancholia. The film developed from conversations Trier had been having with Penélope Cruz after Cruz approached him to work together, but when she chose to do the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film Trier was unwilling to wait for her. He had only seen Dunst in a Spider-Man movie ("He's cast three people now from Spider-Man—Willem [Dafoe], Bryce [Dallas Howard], me," she points out. "I'm like, 'Is Spider-Man the only movie you've ever watched?'"), but he remembered Paul Thomas Anderson telling him years ago that she was a fantastic actress. It is to Dunst's credit that it seems almost impossible, watching Melancholia, to imagine Cruz in the role.

In the movie, the planet heading toward Earth is itself called Melancholia. The film is not about whether the planets will collide—the collision is shown in a flash-forward at the film's beginning. Trier points out that animals on the way to the slaughterhouse still fight for the best place in the truck that carries them there, and that seems to be how he sees the humans whose stories he tells here.

Is that what you think we all are—animals squabbling on our way to the slaughterhouse?

"Yes. I am afraid so. There's a lot more to life than that, but that is part of the truth." He talks about Proust's veneration of great works of art and church windows. "That gives me some joy, but I still think life is a terribly bad idea." He says that if God created life—"which I sincerely doubt"—he didn't think it through. "I think you should have a say when you're born—'Is this really something you want to do?' "

And if you could go back, how would you answer?

"If I had no children, I would have said no. If I could just, with no hurt for anybody, not have been here, I would not have been here."

Because it would have been less painful for you?

"Yes."

···

A few months ago, watching Sean Penn's 1991 movie, The Indian Runner, with his second wife, Trier was very taken with a tattoo sported by Viggo Mortensen's character. "I really want that," he told his wife. "I feel strongly I need that." She was encouraging. He decided that he first wanted to know all he could about this tattoo so he called up Penn, but Penn just told him it was an idea of Mortensen's. "I don't think he was very flattered," Trier says.

That is how Lars von Trier came to have the four letters F U C and K tattooed across the four fingers of his right fist. "I don't see it anymore," he says, "but I feel strongly that it's a part of me. I will still have this in my coffin, which I'm happy for." He laughs. "It's the typical action of a man in what we call, in Danish, 'the panic age.' "

I ask him whether there have been any other symptoms of the panic age.

"I will not answer that question." A long pause. "I've not been taken to court yet."

Perhaps that reply makes you feel uncomfortable. Perhaps you feel that Lars von Trier is not in a space right now where he deserves the freedom to make the kind of jokes that Lars von Trier will nonetheless make. If so, is there even a chance that you will understand, and forgive, his sense of humor—and the same refusal not to say whatever it is that he feels compelled to say—once I have relayed something else he tells me during this tattoo conversation? Will you understand how inconceivable it is to him, even as he muddies the ground with all his intellectual vacillations and self-undermining mental switchbacks, that anybody could truly think that he is the man he has been painted to be? Can you understand that there's probably no way to separate his deep seriousness, his bleakness, his compassion, his flippancy, his cold-heartedness, his drive, his despair, his fearfulness, his self-destructiveness, his sweetness, his fragility, his solid sense of conviction, his dark humor, his stubbornness, and, in spite of it all and maybe at its very core, some weird kind of unimpeachable purity? And, if so, perhaps you can also understand why it may have been impossible for him—even more now than ever before—not to say to me the words: "I also wanted a swastika on my forehead."

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.